Stirring the Wizard's Cauldron - an interview with Mark Barry, author of Violent Disorder

Conjuring up the Wizard of Notts who is speaking with me in his author persona - so let's give a great round of applause for Mark Barry, novelist extraordinaire!

What do you think makes a good story?

I think you have to be a reader and a listener, and you have to love stories. Listening to them, overhearing them on the bus, watching them transpire in your life. Characters, pace, elements of surprise, digressions, and a memorable, heart rending climax are just the technical elements I can think of, but a story, a great story, is a gestalt: always greater than the sum of its parts.

What compelled you to write about violence in sports?

I know quite a few football hooligans, including the stars of Ultra Violence and Violent Disorder, and while other clubs have had books written about them, it was suggested to me that it was about time Notts County had one. The club had some very naughty boys following them at one point, but because the fans of the club are outnumbered five to one by Nottingham Forest, who have also been more successful on the pitch, the stories never got out. Any ethnic minority will tell you that their achievements are always suppressed, and Notts, apparently, are no different. Also, the two books represent all the small clubs who have thirty or so hooligans that never got any publicity because of the antics of the Legacy clubs such as Chelsea or Stoke City, who had gangs of a thousand hooligans. I thought it would be a different take on the subject, which despite a massive Political and Police crackdown, is still a feature of British football matches.

Which book was more difficult to write, Ultra Violence or its sequel, Violent Disorder?  Be specific.

The second book without doubt. Ultra Violence took me eighteen days to write.  It’s rough, raw and ready, and just flew out of me. I had been thinking of it for a couple of years, and so I knew what I was going to write. The two massive fight sequences - at Hartlepool and at home to Luton - are legendary at Notts, and they wrote themselves.

The sequel is much more personal to two of the characters in Ultra Violence, the crazy Bully brothers. It also contains a huge chapter about a very recent match versus Coventry, and the climax reads more like a fiction novel than a traditional “hooliporn” novel like Ultra Violence. It also took me nearly six months to write which for me, is like Joseph Heller’s third novel or Terence Malick’s latest film.

How did you come up with the title?

Violent Disorder is one of the most common offences for football hooligans on the British Statute Books. It’s also neatly connected with Ultra Violence. I was going to call it Bully Brothers, but one of the eponymous characters has done really well for himself in the interim and it wouldn’t have been fair, even though that title is a great book waiting to happen.

How did you come up with the unique cover?  And speaking of covers, the second edition of Ultra Violence has a similar unique design.  Was there a method to your madness?

The two covers, created by Dawn at Dark Dawn Creations, were based on a design by me, taken from a photo of us all in Tenerife in January 2006. Sixty of us went over there for the character named Haxford’s fiftieth birthday party. It’s a great photo, and as there are only ever going to be two books on this topic, I thought a little of the old Yin/Yang might go down well, so we halved the photo and played around with it. I quite like the concept.

What was your favorite chapter to write, and why?

I like the Peterborough chapter. Why? It’s completely bonkers. It has to be read to be believed. The last four pages took ages to write. I also like the Brentford chapter, which is quite well written, written with some experimental techniques I’ve been trying to use for a while, and the one where HobNob goes wandering with his son around an area of Nottingham called Hockley.

There are multiple themes running through the two books.  Is there one particular cause you champion above all else? 

Both books deal with the death of lower league football, the rise of Sky TV and the “plastic” fan. They also talk about the over-aged football hooligan who cannot let it go despite the fact they all should know better. In Ultra Violence, the Luton chapters and the Epilogue, where the gang prepare for one last fight, similar to the one at the end of Peckinpah’s great film, The Wild Bunch, pass muster with any I’ve written before or since. I have half another book on my PC called  The Last Ride of the Should Know Better Club, about a coachload of over-aged yobs who follow Notts home and away, and I may do something with that next year. Great title, huh!

Which character would you choose to promote the book?

Mini-Beefy, HobNob’s son. He’s the most sensible one of the three of them, and he does Media Studies at A’Level. 

With two books in the series, will there be a third?

No. I’ve run out of stories on this subject, and I’ve said what I have to say. Time to move onto other things.

Would you be willing to share a brief excerpt?

In the aftermath of the last match of the season, mobile phone calls are received which chart the battles flaring all over Nottingham. The narrator expressed surprise at what he hears…

Renfield turned to Bull.

You know Jimbo?

I do.

He’s just been at it.

He’s sixty? He was sixty at Bournemouth. They had a party for him.

I know. Good, innit?

I overheard this conversation.

Sixty.

To this day, I would not have believed that sixty year olds fought at football matches, but HobNob isn’t far off, only a decade and a bit away, and I looked at him, in his black shirt and full head of chestnut brown hair, trotting across the canal bridge, a man half his age. The sixty of my youth isn’t the sixty of this generation, the NHS performing miracles in keeping people alive. No more war, healthy eating, and health conscious wives with plenty of culinary ideas other than fish and chips. The end of cigarettes, changing genetic profiles, society’s veneration of everything young and the incredible sense of the pointlessness of the modern world.

Sixty.

The more you looked at the issue of aged football hooligans, there was a certain amount of logic in it.

It was just a number.

One after fifty nine and one before sixty one.

Some Sikh geezer ran the London Marathon, and he was 102. I know an eighty year old who runs ten kilometres a day.

Thirty years ago, sixty meant you were virtually dead, your shifts in a rice pudding factory a millstone around your neck. Weekends spent imprisoned in an armchair, your armchair, a seat to be avoided by everyone for more reasons than one; exhausted, watching a dead television with dead celebrities, dead themes, dead ideas, dead adverts, dead chat and dead game shows, drinking Double Diamond straight from the can and eating fish and chips (extinct fish, potatoes saturated in dead fat) straight from the racing pages of The Sun. Missus slaving, cooking and cleaning, transfixed by a reverie of hour-long Marigold fantasies involving fucking the smiling next door neighbour or sparkly shirted pub singers and/or cool, rum-throated Rastafarians with throbbing purple c***s, and eventually, Mr Sixty would nurture a streaky combover and his nostril gaps would swell like a pike’s gills, and his cheesy teeth would loosen: Tarnished eyes amidst sunken sockets.  A scent sticking to him, a diaphanous presence the consistency of muslin in his faggy armchair on his faggy carpet with his faggy TV, and by the time he was sixty five and retired, he would be six feet under after a massive coronary and his missus of thirty years, before her month of grief was over, would be enjoying her next door neighbour’s salty c**k, her fantasies realised because her rice pudding husband was dead at sixty, she fancied her neighbour something rotten, and luckily for her, those feelings were reciprocated.

Today, the sixty-year-old was off his armchair.

Having a good runabout in Nottingham Town Centre with his mates, his Hackett Cap and blouson, his hundred quid jeans, his Gazelles.

Keeping fit, keeping active.

A healthy regime for the modern age.

Gym in the week.

10k on the treadmill.

Five-a-side with the lads.

Salads and plenty of extra virgin olive oil.

No cigarettes.

No drinking at lunchtime.

No drinking in the week.

Kick fuck out of some know-nothing Cov c**t on a Saturday afternoon with the chaps.

No more armchairs any more.

All the heroes are on the streets.

Purchase Links:

Amazon US

http://www.amazon.com/Violent-Disorder-ebook/dp/B00E8NVBNK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1375701983&sr=8-1&keywords=violent+disorder+by+mark+barry

Amazon UK

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Violent-Disorder-ebook/dp/B00E8NVBNK/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1375702189&sr=1-1&keywords=violent+disorder